Costs, budget and metrics
How Meta charges
Meta charges your own Meta account for WhatsApp messages: per delivered message, priced by the message's category and the customer's country. Messages that fail are not charged.
| Category | Examples |
|---|---|
| Marketing | Offers and promotions. |
| Utility | Order updates and other messages about something the customer did. |
| Authentication | One-time codes. |
| Service | Replies inside the 24-hour window: the bot's answers and your team's replies. |
Meta marks some messages as free, for example service replies it does not charge for. CartWhizz counts those as zero. Your invoice from Meta is what you actually pay; the numbers in CartWhizz are worked out from the rates you enter.
Enter your rates
- Open Customers → WhatsApp Shop → WhatsApp Shop settings and go to Message costs.
- Under What Meta charges per delivered message, enter the price of a Marketing message, Utility message, Authentication message and Service message, in your store's currency. Take them from Meta's rate card for your customers' country.
- Click Save changes.
0 means a category is not tracked. The rates are saved with your WhatsApp connection, so messages from WhatsApp Notifications (order updates, codes, offers) are priced with them too.
What is counted
- Every WhatsApp message your store sends, from WhatsApp Shop and from WhatsApp Notifications, once, when Meta reports it delivered or read and charged at the category's normal price.
- Not counted: messages that failed, messages Meta marks as free, categories whose rate is 0, the few categories without a rate box (such as international authentication), and SMS.
- Spent this month (in the Message costs group) is the total since the first of the month, in your store's time zone.
The monthly budget
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly budget | 0 (no budget) | What WhatsApp messages may cost each month. |
| Stop optional bot messages at the budget | Off | The hard cap: at 100% of the budget the bot stops sending its optional messages until the next month. |
With a budget set:
- At 80% your team gets one notification for the month, and again at 100%.
- With the hard cap off, messages keep going out after 100%; only the notifications tell you.
- With the hard cap on, at 100% the bot stops sending its own answers (menu, categories, search results, products, cart, checkout and order replies) and the after-hours notice. The conversation shows Budget reached — the bot is paused (once a day) so your team sees why.
- With the hard cap on, cart reminders also wait: none goes out until the next month, or until you raise the budget or switch the cap off. A reminder is a marketing message, priced at your Marketing message rate.
What still goes out at the cap:
- the unsubscribe confirmation;
- the connecting and team busy messages, so a customer who asks for a person is still told what is happening;
- everything your team sends from the inbox: text, files, templates, products and checkout links;
- WhatsApp Notifications' messages, such as order updates.
Raising the budget, or switching the cap off, applies within a minute. A new month starts the count again.
The metrics page
Open Customers → WhatsApp Shop → Metrics. Pick Last 7 days, Last 30 days (the default) or Last 90 days, or a Custom range of up to 366 days. Days follow your store's time zone, and a day without activity shows zero.
The tiles at the top are the totals for those days:
| Tile | What it counts |
|---|---|
| New conversations | Conversations that started, with how many were active in total (at least one message). |
| Messages | Messages received from customers and sent to them, by the bot and by your team. |
| Handed to your team | The share of active conversations where the bot handed over to your team: the customer typed a talk-to-a-person keyword or Talk to us. |
| Median first reply | How long customers who asked for a person waited for your team's first reply. |
| Orders | Orders placed through a chat's checkout link. Cancelled, refunded and failed orders are left out. |
| Revenue | What those orders are worth. |
Below them:
- Conversations per day, Messages per day and Revenue per day, each as a Chart or a Table.
- Checkout links: how many links were sent, how many were Opened and how many Became an order.
- WhatsApp spend: this month's spend against your budget, with a meter and the state (within budget, 80% used or used up), and the spend in the selected days. It needs WhatsApp Notifications switched on.
Your simulator chats never count in the metrics.
How long conversations are kept
Keep conversations for (in WhatsApp Shop settings → Data, 180 days by default, 30 to 730) decides how long messages are kept. Every night WhatsApp Shop deletes messages older than that, then closed conversations with no message left, checkout links that expired before then, and contacts that have no conversation and no store account.
- The metrics for days before that show zero conversations and messages. The page says so.
- Your orders are never deleted: they stay in your order list as usual.
- Copies of files kept for the inbox are removed 7 days after their message.
- Simulator chats are not touched; Reset chat in the simulator clears yours.